Language and Literacy Development Center

Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology

The Center

The Language and Literacy Development Center is dedicated to the evaluation of school-age (kindergarten through high school) children who are struggling with language, reading, and/or writing.

We diagnose language and literacy disorders through our comprehensive battery of language and literacy tests as well as vision and hearing screenings.

If services are warranted, we offer empirically supported interventions that are tailored to your child for individual therapy, a Tier 3 intervention. Our services are offered during the fall, spring, and summer semesters.

Testing

We are proud to offer a comprehensive battery of oral language, reading, and writing assessments to determine individual strengths and weakness. Our goal is to identify the specific areas of reading and writing that present as barriers to children succeeding in school.

Our comprehensive reading testing is based on the National Reading Panel's (2000) five pillars of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

Our writing testing focuses on content, mechanics, and transcription.

We rule out vision issues that may be contributing to reading or writing difficulties by conducting vision screenings. We work closely with an optometrist in the community.

We rule out hearing issues that may be contributing to reading or writing difficulties by conducting hearing screenings. We work closely with our audiologist Dr. Megan Swank.

Therapy

The results of our diagnostic evaluation will identify key areas to address in therapy. These areas are combined into a comprehensive individualized therapy session (Tier 3). We use research-based strategies to strengthen areas in need. Our goal is to have children who enjoy reading and writing and to have children who are performing at their academic potential. Oral language skills are the foundation for reading and writing. Children "learn how to read" until 3rd grade and then begin to "read to learn" from 4th grade up. At the same time, children are learning how to write letters, words, and paragraphs as they go through elementary school.

Parents are children's first teachers. We feel that parents play an important role in the development of language and literacy skills throughout their child's life. We are happy to collaborate with parents to identify and tailor activities for parents to incorporate in the home.

"This program has been outstanding. We have seen so much improvement in our child. I am so glad we were recommended to this program."

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